


but I'm not ready to say good night

by violentdarlings



Category: Me Before You (2016), Me Before You - Jojo Moyes
Genre: Angst, Bizarre Twist of Fate, F/M, I Don't Even Know, I know nothing about planes, Me Before You broke my feelings, Quadriplegia, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 05:47:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7254976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Louisa has to face a world without Will, Will has to live in a world without Louisa.</p>
<p>Or: bizarre twist of fate = happy ending. Happyish ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but I'm not ready to say good night

**Author's Note:**

> Me Before You is the worst book ever. I mean it. And by that I mean, I love it. Don't even get me started on the movie and After You. My feelings are still recovering.
> 
> Title from Eyelids by PVRIS. Me Before You belongs to Jojo Moyes.

_These eyes are closed again for yet another night._

_I wake up and I can feel you by my side,_

_but I can't find you in the dark when you're so far._

_Yeah that's the hardest part._

_Here comes the hardest part._

_\- Eyelids, PVRIS_

 

You knows something’s wrong, when you hear it.

“Oh, my God.” It’s your mother, sounding absolutely wrecked, and you lift your head from the pillow. It’s not time, yet. Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the end.

“What is it, Camilla?” your dad asks, and there is something like a muffled sob. They come into the room together, and it’s bloody weird to see them huddled so close together, like the past twenty years of infidelity and lies haven’t happened. Your mum is crying. It’s too soon for her to be crying. She’s got her phone in a death grip, and she’s staring at it like she can’t believe her eyes.

“It’s Louisa,” she says, and your heart stops in your chest. “The flight she was on has just crashed.”

“Clark? What flight?” you ask, your voice rising. “Mum, _what flight?”_ When she looks over at you, there is a thousand things in her eyes, but more than anything guilt.

“I asked her to come,” she whispers, and you swear so loudly your voice bounces back around the room.

 

The news is full of it. All the usual headlines that crop up when a tragedy happens. Not a small tragedy like yours, the end of only one world, the alteration of only a handful of lives, a disaster in microcosm. No, a vast and terrible tragedy. No more plane. No more Clark.

The next day comes, and you tell everyone who comes near you to go fuck themselves. The thirteenth of August passes in a haze of bad news and waiting, waiting. They haven’t released a list of the dead. They can’t find the bloody plane.

Fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth. You speak to Louisa’s sister Katrina, who is crying so hard down the phone line that she cannot draw breath. “She’d been so sad, these past days,” the girl says, Louisa’s sister, maybe one of the last things left of your Clark in this world. “I told her to get on the plane, to go to you. It’s all my fault.”

You clear your throat, and manage to speak. “It’s not your fault,” you tell her, and she starts crying again. But you’re right. It’s not her fault. It’s yours. “How’s Josie – Josephine? And Bernard?” Katrina sniffs.

“Dad’s okay. Well. He keeps cracking bad jokes to try and cheer everyone up and sneaking off for a cry in the laundry. Mum’s – she’s not doing so good. She – she didn’t want Lou to go to Switzerland in the first place. She thinks it’s –”

“Wrong,” you finish for her. You’ve never met Katrina, but she talks a bit like Clark does. Did. Fuck.

 

On the seventeenth, the news breaks. They’ve found the plane, crashed in some fucking field in the Ukraine, so far away from where it ought to be that no one had even thought to look there. A problem with the steering and the communications and finally crash landing when the fuel ran out, twenty miles from a village in the Ukraine still stuck in the 1950s.

Five died. Five, out of a plane of dozens. And there, on the news cameras hastily on the scene, just for a moment, is an exhausted looking girl wrapped in a blanket in the village’s town hall, drinking a cup of tea. Her hair is a bedraggled mess and she looks like she hasn’t slept in a year. But it’s Clark. Of course bloody Clark, drinking a cup of tea sedately while your world went to shit. Bloody typical.

You burst into tears when you see her and have to tell your family to bugger off for half an hour while you try to stop snivelling.

The next day, your mum sits by your bedside. “What do you want to do?” she asks. She looks like years have come off her face since she found out Louisa is all right. You sigh.

“Let’s just fucking go home.” For once, she doesn’t frown at your language.

 

Nathan meets you at the airport. He has the car and a grin as big as his stupid Kiwi heart. He tries to tamp it down, but he can’t help it; you hear him humming as he carries your bags outside. “Have you heard from Clark?” you ask, striving for nonchalance. The keen look Nathan gives you suggests that you may have not been successful.

“She’s coming back tomorrow,” he says. “I, ah. Spoke to her sister yesterday.” There is a curious flush in Nathan’s face. You peer up at him, and he scowls. “Nice girl,” he mutters. You start to smile, and it feels like it’s been decades.

“What happened to Karen?” you ask slyly. Nathan calls you a wanker under his breath and you pretend, for his sake, that you didn’t hear it.

The annexe hasn’t changed. Nothing has changed, except you. Except for a while there was a world without Clark in it, and it had no meaning. And if she feels for you even a shred of what you feel for her, then how is it fair that you leave? Love is sacrifice. You learned that, when you systematically and callously pushed Alicia away after the accident. And you learned that, when Clark almost died coming to fulfil your last wish, even if she didn’t believe it was the right thing to do.

Love means sacrifice. And you’re going to stick the fuck around as long as Clark wants you to, come hell, high water, pneumonia, pressure injuries (not that Nathan would ever let you develop a pressure wound) or whatever else your useless body throws at you. And if you die of some random infection or AD or a plane falls out of the fucking sky, then at least Clark had as long with you as possible. It’s no longer a question of trying to protect her from the inevitable outcome of your death. She’s already invested. And as you’ve seen, it’s easy enough for completely healthy people to die. Or get sick. Or be paralysed from the neck down.

 

“Did you hear me shriek all the way up here at the castle?” Clark asks. You spin around so fast you swear you hear your wheels shrieking. She’s standing in the doorway, and she looks dreadful. She looks amazing. Your parents are hovering behind her; you try and communicate fuck off with your gaze, but they appear to be ignoring it.

“What?” you ask, very stupidly. Clark shrugs.

“I shrieked. And swore. And ran all the way up here, when Treena got round to telling me you came back from Dignitas. That you hadn’t gone through with it.” Abruptly, you find your voice.

“Of course I didn’t go through with it!” you snap. “What with you being daft enough to end up in a _plane crash_ –”

“You can’t blame that on me,” she says at once. “I wouldn’t have been on that plane if you hadn’t decided to _kill yourself_ –”

“If you weren’t being stubborn, you could have been on the same plane as me. The plane that didn’t fall out of the damn sky.”

“And you’d be gone,” she counters, and the fight goes out of you. “You can’t convince me this isn’t better.”

“Better?” you ask. “You look like shit.” She smiles gently, and she’s crying, and you want to reach out and hold her, but you can’t.

“You look amazing,” she replies, and your starved heart eagerly drinks down the words and asks for more. “You’re everything.”

“I’m not,” you reply. “But –”

“Yes?” she asks, and when did she get so close? When did her eyes all fill up with stars, like there is a whole galaxy untapped and unexplored inside of her? Like one woman could be enough of an adventure to keep you here for a bit longer, like there’s no need for mountains or beaches or skydiving or _anything_ as long as she’s by your side.

“I wanted to do all these things for you,” you tell her, your secrets falling out like you haven’t been guarding them close for months. “I wanted to make sure you were looked after, when I was gone.” Clark smiles through her tears; it’s like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“You absolute fucking idiot,” she says, and your mum makes a tiny noise like a protest, but who cares. “Will Traynor, prize fucking idiot. I love you.” She plonks herself right down on your lap, and kisses away your reply.

Everything is all fucked up and perfect, and Clark loves you.

There’s nothing to be done but say it back.


End file.
